Industry Press releases

Edgeware’s TV CDN technology has been nominated as the Best Digital TV Product or Broadcast Innovation at the prestigious Sports Technology Awards, which celebrate innovation in sports. Using a single platform built using Edgeware technology for the delivery of live sports programming, content distributors can deliver better viewing experiences with no buffering, no delays and no glitches.

As a live sports content distributor – whether a broadcaster or even a league or team delivering any amount of live content – the delivery stream must have low-latency. If a viewer is watching content that has a delay compared to other delivery methods, then fans’ viewing experiences will be spoilt by social media, messaging apps or even cheers or groans through the wall as neighbors see the action sooner.

For those content distributors, operating their own delivery network could be the answer. A dedicated TV CDN means they can control the bandwidth to ensure quality of service, whereas, by renting space from a third-party vendor, they have to share bandwidth which will affect the latency on the stream and could affect performance, particularly if a lot of people are watching at the same time.

And it’s not just live streams delivered to smart TVs and mobile devices, a dedicated delivery infrastructure is perfect to deliver content that requires more bandwidth like higher resolutions, virtual reality or 360-degree cameras.

Using the control offered by having your own dedicated TV CDN, several European TV providers were able to deliver a huge amount of content to large audiences during the UEFA EURO 2016 tournament with no buffering, delays or glitches. During the games, audiences were concentrated in the broadcaster’s home-region, at a specific kick-off time when demand was much higher than usual.

The number of fans consuming media and their location also has an impact on whether content distributors should be delivering content themselves. Leading analysts Frost & Sullivan recently released a whitepaper, commissioned by Edgeware which identifies the exact tipping point at which content owners should stop renting space on a delivery network and when they should build their own.

For example, when delivering a lot of content to a concentrated group of people, delivering content via a purpose-built could also be the answer.